Two areas of much buzzing that I’ve been following this year: multitouch interfaces, and Yamaha’s experimental — but commercially available — Tenori-On musical instrument (above). From what I’ve seen of the Tenori-on it doesn’t seem particularly inspirational from a musical point of view, but the biggest downside has to be that it’s a totally closed platform, with no way of users experimenting or developing the interface themselves. So I’ve been interested to see various DIY alternatives popping up.

I’ve seen a couple of LED-based multitouch surfaces recently… First off Swiss students André Huber and Roland Broennimann have created Natebu which they showed at the DIY Festival in Zürich a couple of weeks ago. Heavy engineering all the way, but combines both output and input as well as sensing distance. The video shows a demo of a small panel running with a processing app, but they’re aiming to make large ones of these for public spaces.

Meanwhile Thomas Pototschnig from Germany has an 8×8 matrix design posted, which looks simple but with some serious ARM-based grunt behind the scenes. Thomas’s prototype uses LEDs as input — a technique that Jeff Han notes dates back to at least 1977, and which might create hybrid input/output panels at low cost in the future.

Another alternative comes from monome in Philadelphia, who produce kits for a range of different-sized devices featuring back-lit silicone keys, a simple USB interface and a simple GPL-licensed “driver” sending out OSC. I can imagine the tactle feedback of the switches helping with accuracy (as with Tenori-On) compared to LED-based solutions, but I guess it depends what you want to do.

These look great and their latest batch of kits sold out in 4 hours, so there’s obviously a lot of interest from the DIY community despite the relatively high price tag.

Touch-screens are also an option, as with the high-end JazzMutant Lemur and Dexter devices. Gcontrol (pictured below) might be a first step towards a DIY version, albeit designed for single-touch screens and unfortunately PC-only. It’s only a matter of time before someone does something like this on the iPhone — SDKs and Jobs willing. And assuming we don’t see an Apple vs Microsoft vs JazzMutant patent-war over the tech, then once multitouch LCD panels start to hit the streets making your own DIY Lemur-lookalike should become pretty straightforward.

Lots of good coverage on this kind of stuff at MusicThing, Create Digital Music, MAKE:blog and the erstwhile Pixelsumo.